'I'm 45 and I'm going insane'

Indie eccentrics the Flaming Lips are back with another mad album about life, death - and, this time, politics too. Singer Wayne Coyne talks to Neil McCormick

Wayne Coyne contemplates what his band the Flaming Lips would sound like, unplugged and acoustic, their songs stripped to their bare essence. He speculates on the use of harps, bassoons and, maybe, if it were allowed, a troupe of jugglers, but eventually gives up. "I think it would suck, to tell you the truth," he cheerfully admits.

If it is impossible for even their brave leader to be reductionist about the Flaming Lips, it is only because their very ethos is so utterly extravagant, wildly experimental and gloriously original. Their 10th album, At War With the Mystics, is released next month, an endearingly mad explosion of 21st-century psychedelic protest pop and gaudily colourful sonic collage.

The Lips don't claim to be particularly accomplished musicians ("We're really punk-rockers fumbling in the dark to try to find something beautiful," confesses Coyne), but they make records that are more than the sum of their parts, bizarre but compelling confections that don't sound quite like anything you have ever heard before. Although to listen to Coyne, their originality is as much by accident as design.

"A lot of records are really people performing with microphones in front of them," he says. "When I think of Frank Sinatra, he's up all night drinking, the band are rehearsing the song, he walks in, sings in the microphone in one take, says 'f*** it, I'm out of here' - that's the record. There would be no point us trying to make those kinds of records because we've never been a really tight rock band. We're weird and we're sloppy. But we discovered we really love playing around with sounds and atmospheres in the studio, so it's hard to tell where the arrangement ends and the song begins. We're kind of presenting to you a whole other world that we can all live in for an hour."

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Wayne's world is certainly a fascinating place. Even without his extraordinary band, the unkempt, bearded frontman with smiling eyes proves to be one of the most agreeable, articulate, amusing, insightful and downright entertaining individuals I have ever interviewed. I could talk to him all day, and I have a feeling he would be happy to oblige. Any topic sends him off on rambling yet thoughtful discourses, of which the print version can only offer edited highlights.

Much like his records, Coyne's conversational style maintains a delicate balance between light and heavyweight, embracing life's complexities with the air of a genial bar-room philosopher.

"We start out trying to make some fantastical, unbelievable, drug-induced, horrible, wonderful thing," he says of the Lips' oeuvre, "but even though we're peering into outer space with wizards and spaceships and all that childlike imagery, we're really looking inside ourselves. It always comes back to, 'I'm a 45-year-old man. I'm going insane.' Art's only worthwhile if you really have something inside of you that you have to get out, I think. I'm not saying it to change the world. I'm just saying it to change myself."

Since their formation in Oklahoma in 1983, the Lips have had an absurd, almost accidental career. They lingered on the sidelines as indie eccentrics for most of two decades, playing outlandish concerts full of acts of surrealistic burlesque to a small but devoted audience who would often come dressed in animal costumes in their honour (Coyne himself sometimes appeared as a guitar-playing rabbit).

Then in 1999 they released their studio masterpiece The Soft Bulletin and everything changed. Although dealing with the dark materials of suffering and mortality, it radiated a kind of blissful positivity, becoming one of the most critically acclaimed and influential albums of its era.

"It was a wonderful accident," says Coyne. "What I thought I was doing was writing from brutal and horrible experience and taking the veil away to say, 'Look, life is tough. People get old, they get sick, they suffer, they die.' We thought it would be gloom and doom coming out of the speakers and everybody who heard it would go and kill themselves, but as we were singing about death, it started to feel triumphant, as though we're not being defeated by it. Our resilience was coming through and that came as a great relief. Since then I've felt optimism almost always prevails. I can start to talk about death and before you know it I'm talking about life. When we make music it almost always goes towards other possibilities."

Coyne is a comically rationalist atheist ("I wish I did believe in God. It would be a great relief to think, 'God'll take care of it. God'll put gas in the car tomorrow'") who makes music that, for all its quirkiness and frivolity, is in its essence spiritually transcendental. "That's the wonder and the power

of music. It has an abstract vagueness that is essentially subjective - you turn it into whatever you want. It doesn't happen with all art forms. A lot of art destroys you and replaces you with whatever's in front of you. Movies do that. Rarely do you walk into a movie and see yourself in the character. The movie makes you cry and makes you happy but as soon as it's over you go back to being your schlumpy old self. But music comes in and your life becomes epic. Your life is now the Bible - you can be walking to the store to buy some coffee and suddenly it's this great meaningful moment. Music colours the whole experience with wonder and mystery and all that stuff that is stripped away by your conscious mind."

The release of the million-selling Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2002 established the Flaming Lips as alternative icons with more songs about death and transcendence. Their new album is, if anything, even more eccentric, but with its spine hardened by a noticeably political dimension. Coyne claims he started out writing a concept album about "a wizard going into outer space searching for a supernova galaxy cluster that has formed in the exact dimension of a naked star queen", but his muse kept getting hijacked by "having some horrible, humiliating, ridiculous George Bush moment happening in the country". The new single, The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, is a plea for political compassion, complete with silly hooks and delivered in a dodgy falsetto. Coyne is under no illusions that Lips fans dressed in rabbit suits are going to storm the Capitol and bring down the government, but believes that simply articulating these ideas is enough. For an atheist, he has a touching faith in the power of song to ease our shared burden.

"There's some comfort in saying, I'm joining this long line of humanity," he says. "We're all going to get in line and our parents will die and our friends will die but I'm in the line with you and you're in it with me and, for some reason, if we're in it together, it's better than doing it alone. That's why music is always going to save us."